Organizers of the LCS Summer Finals expects a crowd of up to 15,000 for the e-sports event.

This weekend the $865 million global esports industry has come to Detroit in a big way.

Riot Games brought its League of Legends Championship Series (LCS) summer finals to over 10,000 expected fans at Little Caesars Arena with a $100,000 prize pot. Viewership on Twitch, Amazon's live-streaming platform, eclipses that by orders of magnitude.

Typically esports — professional competitive video gaming — tournaments stick to the coasts, but lately Riot has been looking to expand its footprint and take its biggest shows to new markets. Motown's turn in the esports spotlight has the potential to make it more of a hub for the genre.

"It's a big score," said High Score Esports lounge owner Nathaniel McClure. "To have an event of that caliber here is incredibly exciting, especially when Michigan and Detroit aren't known for it."

Last year's LCS world championship in South Korea had over 100 million viewers online. In 2017, the event was held at Beijing's Olympic stadium and sold out 40,000 seats. Last year the global esports market was valued at almost $865 million, and Statista forecasts that number will almost double by 2022.

It begs the question, why Detroit?

"We try to make sure we're being diverse in the cities we bring our show to, quarter over quarter," LCS commissioner Chris Greeley said. "We want to make sure that if you're a fan of League of Legends in North America, there's a shot that a show is coming toward you."

He said Detroit is in a great spot to help that happen. The city is quickly becoming a regional tech hub with Google and Microsoft offices downtown, plus it has the ability to draw in attendees from Canada and the East Coast in addition to Illinois, Indiana and Ohio. The upswing is getting young visitors from the surrounding region who typically wouldn't consider Detroit as a travel destination while passively courting them for potential relocation.

The scouting process for host cities started earlier this year — and it might remind you of bidding for a Super Bowl.

Riot has been working with Dan Gilbert's Quicken Loans — the event's premier sponsor — since February to get an understanding of what an LCS Detroit event would look like. From there, they brought Riot executives to the city to show them the progress made toward rebuilding downtown, and then toured them through Little Caesars Arena. The latter's tech infrastructure made Detroit an easy pick.

Because Riot runs all of its broadcasts from its Los Angeles headquarters, it needed a strong network. Typically it has to run its own cable at each venue, but for the Summer Finals was able to piggyback off LCA's fiber optic network. It was also able to use the venue's center-hanging video screens rather than rigging its own 22' by 44' displays from the ceiling.

Quicken Loans chief marketing officer Casey Hurbis wouldn't reveal how much it invested in the sponsorship, but described it as "a healthy investment." In addition to the sponsorship package, Quicken has other ties to esports. Gilbert is part owner of LCS powerhouse 100 Thieves, and has sponsored the team for two seasons. The Quicken Loans co-founder also owns the Cleveland Cavaliers NBA 2K esports team, Cavs Legion.

Despite this, Riot said Quicken Loans' sponsorship and team ownership didn't play a role in picking a host city for the event.

"It's certainly nice to use [local sponsors] to make introductions," Greeley said. Ultimately, if Riot leans too heavily on regional affinity of the teams, Greeley said it leads to uncomfortable conversations with other team owners, a situation it would rather avoid. "It was not a deciding factor for us," he said.

Instead, it was the region's sports legacy and density of Riot's fans that made the biggest impact on decision making.

The event also has the chance to reshape perceptions of Detroit not just from a public standpoint, but from a business perspective as well. This was the first and largest esports event of its caliber in the city. Previously in 2014, Red Bull brought its Battlegrounds series to 1,200-capacity Garden Theater up the street from LCA in Midtown.

The ultimate success of the LCS may go beyond the number of pizza slices sold and hotels booked — Riot's production crew accounted for 800 room nights downtown alone — and could transform Detroit into a regional hub for esports in general, marrying the city's sports legacy with its burgeoning tech community.

"Detroit, we're a great sports town, but when you look at esports I think it can carry over," the Detroit Sports Commission's Marty Dobek. "With every event we host, we're going to make sure it's a first-class operation and a great experience for everybody."

Jeff Zajac, manager of the Detroit Renegades esports team, agreed.

"If you look at Michigan, there hasn't been too big of a push in terms of esports or as an esports hub," he said. Combined with Google's and Microsoft's offices downtown, he said the growing number of LAN centers and arcade bars popping up — not to mention the high school and collegiate esports scene — are proof that the state is primed to become one of the next big regions for play.

Total esports viewership has surpassed that of professional baseball, hockey, basketball and soccer, according to Syracuse University, with 84 million viewers in the U.S. alone. By 2021, it predicts esports viewership will surpass that of the NFL.

"Michigan's sports legacy lends itself very well to this narrative," McClure said. "Hopefully we'll see that continue to play out."